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I use a USB drive to play music in my car. Unfortunately, the car does not sort the music alphabetically and relies on how the music is sorted on the FAT32 drive.

This Windows software here solves the problem. Anything comparable available for me on Ubuntu?

PS: at first I thought it was a file creation date problem askubuntu question. But although I figured out the answer to that question, it didn't solve the problem like I thought it would.

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Chad--24216
  • 1,231

4 Answers4

18

You might want to use fatsort which is available in Ubuntu and was designed to solve your exact problem. Cheers,

rmn
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9

fatsort solves the problem. First install fatsort then, list partitions in order to get the usb key device path

cat /proc/partitions

Let's take /dev/sde1 as an example.

Finally

sudo fatsort -f /dev/sde1

problem solved, without wine nor windows ;-)

FredFF
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1

Your best bet is to use DriveSort under Wine, as its author recommends

To quote DriveSort's author, the program is "tightly bound to Microsoft APIs", so I doubt you will find a native Linux equivalent where a non-native filesystem (FAT) is concerned.

You can run it under Wine as the author has tried and recommended, with some caveats:

  • You must run it with gksudo
  • You will need mfc42u.dll, which you can install in the same directory from the internet (google), or install it using the winetricks package.
  • Once sorting is completed, DriveSort attempts to unmount/remount the drive; remounting doesn't succeed in Wine, so you can either safely pull out the USB for use, or manually remount it.
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ish
  • 141,990
0

It is a lazy solution, but you could just move the files out and than in again ...

create a temporary dir

mkdir /tmp/mydrive

move all files out

mv /media/thumbdrive/* /tmp/mydrive

and then all in again

mv /tmp/mydrive/* /media/thumbdrive

this might get the files in the thumbdrive in alfabetical order. I am not sure though ... Try it out

You might also want to look at: Sort files on the filesystem (same question) and at: http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0010.html (some program recomendations)

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josinalvo
  • 7,017